«Midnight Cowboy» brings together strands of UK Funky, IDM and Grime to create a unique take on contemporary percussion club music. Informed by DIY black music cultures like Dancehall and Techno, Instant Graham pays tribute by sampling genre-related voices, percussion, and found sounds.
The EP positions the listener as the ‘Midnight Cowboy’, an absurd avatar that experiences a series of spaces designed to create disorientation, introspection and catharsis. A restless sound design palette and hard-edged samples stretches over a series of rhythms ranging from blocky syncopated rhythms to landscapes of tension and release.
We have had the pleasure of speaking with Instant Graham and this has been the result.
Can you tell us a little about your experience? Where are you from / how did you get into music? Was it all internet based?
Yes, the internet has always been my primary vehicle for exploring music. I think it’s funny how insecure some of the platforms we use are. It’s easy to take the internet for granted, but nothing is permanent there. A few years ago, my personal YouTube account was banned, which caused me to lose years and years of playlists. All because there was a song I’d uploaded as a teenager and forgotten about that got a copyright strike. Now it’s too late to remove and all of that music is lost to me. So my experience of music comes from the internet, but it’s not a very secure place for it.
Who have been your main inspirations (both musical and in «life»)? And how have they affected your sound?
Musically, Grime is a key influence in a lot of what I produce and am interested in, and I think its influence is huge in the most exciting music today – from uptempo, hard-edged club music, to international Drill music, to developing styles such as hyperpop. And from there, styles like UK Funky, Garage, and the mixed Club genres that came from them are key influences. I’ve always been very into things like Techno, Trance, and IDM – a lot of what I’ve been releasing could be seen as chanelling the sounds of those genres into the structure of UK music. And finally, I’ve always listened to a lot of Hip Hop, R’n’B, and Dancehall, all of which interact heavily with the other genres mentioned.
How would you define your sound?
I think I’m still searching and developing a defined ‘sound’ – but I think with this release there’s a lot of emphasis on warped, digital sound, where there’s some blurring between the roles of percussion, bass, and melodics. I also rely a lot on human voice to bring more abstract sounds together.
How has your sound evolved so far?
For me its been a pretty slow process of producing for quite some time before I was creating work that I was happy with. I think that might be partly down to the fairly diverse genres of music I’ve been interested in – but I think that’s a good thing, and I’m always trying to learn and study different approaches to music. For some people, having a more defined focus might be very fruitful, but it’s not how I’m wired.
What can you tell us about your last job? What inspired you? What do you want to convey? What can you tell us about each song that makes up your latest work? What is hidden behind?
Dream Glyph – This track was difficult but rewarding to make. It was based on a dream, which we all know are hard to put into words, but I’ll try:
I was looking into the sky, and there was an enormous structure there, like the spaceship in Independence Day. But it was an enormous circuit board. And I could sense (it was one of those dreams where all sensations are merged) these enormous runes passing through the circuit board – like ancient letters. They looked like pieces of Stonehenge, and they were descending down through the circuit board to earth. And as they passed through they made eerie sounds, the stone rasping through the raw electronics to fizz and ring out.
When I woke up and reflected on the dream, ‘Dream Glyph’ just came as a natural caption to it – a glyph means the shape of a letter, or part of it.
No Sleep ‘til Clapton – Clapton is an area of East London where lots of buses meet, and I’d often pass through it on the way back to my girlfriend’s house in neighboring Walthamstow after we’d had a long night out. So, when you’re in Clapton it’s time to shape up because you’re nearly home. And of course, it’s an imitation the classic Motorhead album No Sleep ‘til Hammersmith.
The tune itself was really fast and intuitive to make. It works because its so simple, there’s about 2 notes in the whole thing, which is a complete reversal to my usual labour intensive way of working. It heavily references old-school UK Funky, like Hardhouse Banton, Lil Silva, and Cooly G.
The vocal bootleg comes from a Dancehall track I was listening to a lot at the time – I extracted an an acapella to work with, and that directed the structure of the track.
10 Minutes to Midnight & Midnight Cowboy – This came from combining a few different projects that had faltered, and developing them around the ‘Midnight Cowboy’ idea. One part came from experiments I was doing in chopping breaks and creating interesting drum patterns using a combination of MIDI and audio tools in Ableton, and from a project where I was experimenting with arpeggios and using stacked LFOs to chaotically modulate pads.
I took these and developed them under the idea of making a “Cowboy” trance song, in the same way that Bullion had made a “Pirate” house track with ‘Blue Pedro’. One day I’d found a dictionary website that listed all related phrases to a word, and even read them out to you in different languages – that really appealled to me, in it’s absurd and robotic style, so I used it for the vocals.
Originally it was one much longer tracks, but I decided to seperate off ‘10 Minutes to Midnight’ as a track of its own that could be more self-indulgently engaged in sound design, so as to let ‘Midnight Cowboy’ at least have some pretensions of being a club track.
How are you living the current situation because of COVID? Has your work affected you a lot? Do you think there is hope? I feel like the underground scene will continue to persist.
I’m lucky enough to have come through the COVID pandemic with my health intact. I made a lot of changes in my life, and I feel like there was perhaps some reset of the music scene in London, but there’s still a lot of poor practises going on. That can range from damaging and unethical behaviour (lack of diversity, discrimination, lack of accessiblity) to just very cliched music floating around, There are many people scrambling to vocalise this much better than I could, so I’ll leave that to them – but you should take what nightlife talking heads say with a pinch of salt, naturally everyone has their own agenda. I think that there is hope as long as DIY venues have space to flourish and there is opportunity for diversity and equity in the scene. Examples of important spaces and projects:
Avalon Cafe
Ormside Projects
Unit 18 MOT
The Cause
What projects are you working on right now?
After finishing the EP I wasn’t interesting in making music for a short time, but I’ve been feeling inspired again recently. It’s early stages yet, but my goal for 2022 is to release a project working with vocalists – drawing a lot more on Rap, R’n’B and Dancehall. But I’m sure there will be some club music on the side as well.
